Engineer Around Your Weaknesses

I have a friend named Andrew who used to play poker professionally. And when I say professionally, I mean he’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it.

One of the lessons he learned from that experience is the concept of figuring out what your natural tendencies are, and engineering around the weaknesses of those tendencies.

More specifically to poker, it’s bad to be too tight (not betting enough), and it’s bad to be too loose (betting too much). So if you’re naturally loose, learn how to be more tight. And if you’re naturally tight, learn how to become more loose.

Work on weaknesses, not strengths

This is a great lesson for everyone.

What it teaches is that your strengths are probably pretty epic already. Even if they’re not yet, putting effort into them is not likely to be nearly as powerful as fixing your flaws.

Examples of common weaknesses:

Dressing poorly

Being afraid of or bad at presenting

Most people would magnify their capabilities by 2-10X by working on these types of core problems. And this work would yield far better results than going from a 91/100 to a 93/100 in writing, or penetration testing, or what have you.

Engineer it

What we should take away from this is that smart people need to engineer around their weaknesses.

Figure out what they are

Research the shit out of the solution, in terms of a system, not goals